A communication network can be considered to be comprised of a number of individual nodes with communication links among the nodes. Typically, each node within the network is not directly linked with every other node in the network, and data being communicated from an initial node to a destination node makes a number of hops within the network via one or more intermediary nodes. The communication links between nodes may be wireless links (e.g., radio frequency (RF), microwave, free-space optical) in the case of a wireless network, wired links (e.g., telephone wire, coaxial cable, optical fiber) in the case of a wired network, or a combination of wireless and wired links in the case of a mixed type communication network. The active communication links among the nodes during a particular time period define a particular topology for the network, and a given network may have multiple possible topologies depending upon which links are active during different time periods.
One field of communications network research is topology determination. One goal of topology determination research is determining the network topology that provides the best engineering solution for a given set of nodes, links between nodes, quality of service considerations, and network traffic patterns. This goal is relevant to both wireless and wired networks as new fixed topologies may need to be determined to account for network transformations. Intervals between topology updates may be relatively short (e.g., milliseconds to minutes) in wireless mobile networks and relatively long (e.g., days to months) in wired networks.